Death Match (17 page)

“How long have you worked at Eden?” he asked after a moment.

“Three years. Since just after its founding.”

“And it’s as great a place to work as Mauchly says?”

“It always has been.”

Lash waited as she stirred her soup, a little uncertain what she meant by this. “Tell me about Silver.”

“How do you mean.”

“Well, what’s he like? He wasn’t at all what I expected.”

“Me, neither.”

“I take it this was the first time you’ve met him face to face.”

“I saw him once before, at the first anniversary celebration. He’s a very private person. Never leaves his penthouse, as far as anybody knows. Communicates by cell or videophone. It’s just him up there. Him and Liza.”

Liza
. Silver had mentioned that name, too. At the time, Lash had thought it a slip of the tongue. “Liza?”

“The computer. His life’s work. What makes Eden possible. Liza’s his one true love. Kind of ironic, really, given the nature of our business. He does most of his communicating to the board and the staff through Mauchly.”

Lash was surprised. “Really?”

“Mauchly’s his right-hand man.”

Lash noticed that somebody was looking at him from across the cafeteria. The youthful face, the bright thatch of hair, seemed familiar. Then he realized who it was: Peter Hapwood, the evaluation engineer Mauchly had introduced him to the day of the class reunions. Hapwood smiled, waved. Lash waved back.

He returned his attention to Tara, who was once again stirring her soup. “Tell me more about Liza,” he said.

“It’s a hybrid supercomputer. Nothing else like it in the world.”

“Why?”

“It’s the only large computer built entirely around a core of artificial intelligence.”

“And how did Silver come to build it?”

Tara took a sip of tea. “You hear rumors. Stories, really. I don’t know exactly how true any of them are. Some people say Silver had a lonely, traumatic childhood. Others say he was coddled, doing differential equations at the age of eight. He’s never talked about it on record. All anybody knows for sure is, by the time he got to college, he was doing pioneering work in AI. Brilliant, genius-level stuff. His graduate work centered around a computer that could learn for itself. He gave it a personality, made its problem-solving algorithms more and more sophisticated. Eventually, he proved a computer that can teach itself could solve problems far more difficult than any hand-coded computer. Later, to finance further research, he farmed out Liza’s processing cycles to places like the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Human Genome Project.”

“And then he had his brainstorm. Eden, with Liza as the computational core. And the rest, as they say, is history.” Lash took a sip of coffee. “So what’s Liza like to work with?”

There was a pause. “We never get near the core routines or intelligence. Liza’s physical plant is in the penthouse, and only Silver has access. Everybody else—scientists, technicians, even the computer programmers—uses the corporate computer grid and Liza’s data abstraction layer.”

“Liza’s
what
?”

“A shell that creates virtual machines within the computer’s memory space.” Tara paused again. More and more pauses were creeping into her sentences. Then, abruptly, she stood up.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Could we talk about this some other time? I have to go.”

And without another word she turned and left the cafeteria.

TWENTY

W
hen Mauchly walked into the office around four, Lash was standing before his whiteboard. The man moved so silently Lash didn’t notice him until he was by his side.

“Christ!” Lash jumped, dropping his marker.

“Sorry. Should have knocked.” Mauchly glanced at the bulletin board. “Race, age, type, personality, employment, geographics, victims. What’s this?”

“I’m trying to type the killer. Assemble a profile.”

Mauchly turned his placid gaze on Lash. “We still don’t know there’s a killer.”

“I’ve gone over all your records. There’s nothing psychologically wrong with the Thorpes or the Wilners, zero clinical evidence of suicide. It would be a waste of time to explore that avenue further. And you heard what Lelyveld said in the boardroom: we don’t
have
time.”

“But there’s no signs of murder, either. The Thorpes’ security camera, for one thing. It didn’t show anybody entering or leaving the house.”

“It’s a lot easier to cover up a murder than to cover up a suicide. Security cameras can be interfered with. Alarms can be bypassed.”

Mauchly thought about this. Then he looked back at the writing on the board. “How do you know the killer is in his late twenties or early thirties?”

“I don’t. That’s the baseline for serial killers. We have to start with the pattern, and refine from there.”

“And how about this: that he’s either well employed or has access to money?”

“He killed people on opposite coasts within a week of each other. That’s not the modus operandi of a drifter or a hitchhiker: their killing patterns chart erratically across short distances.”

“I see. And this?” Mauchly pointed to the scrawled words, TYPE: U
NKNOWN
.

“That’s the troubling part. Usually, we type serial killers as organized or disorganized. Organized killers control their crime scenes and their victims. They’re smart, socially acceptable, sexually competent. They target strangers, hide their corpses. On the other hand, disorganized killers know their victims, act suddenly and spontaneously, feel little or no stress during the crime, have few work skills, leave the victim at the scene of the crime.”

“And?”

“Well, if someone murdered the Thorpes and the Wilners, he exhibits traits of both the organized and disorganized killer. There’s no coincidence here: he’d have to know the victims. Yet he left them at the scene, like a disorganized killer. But again, the scene isn’t in the least bit sloppy. Such inconsistencies are extremely rare.”

“How rare?”

“I never came across a serial killer like it.”

Except once
, came the voice in his head. He quickly pushed the voice far away.

“If we can get a fix on this guy,” Lash went on, “we can compare it against criminal records. Look for a match. Meanwhile, have you thought about keeping a sharp eye on the other four supercouples?”

“We can’t do a close surveillance for obvious reasons. And we can’t provide adequate protection until we know exactly what’s going on. But yes, we’re already getting teams in place.”

“Where are the rest located?”

“All across the country. The closest couple, the Connellys, live north of Boston. I’ll have Tara get you brief reports on all of them.”

Lash nodded slowly. “You really think she’s the right person for me to work with?”

“Why do you ask?”

“She doesn’t seem to like me. Or else she’s dealing with some issues that are distracting her.”

“Tara’s going through a hard time. But she’s the best we have. Not only is she chief security tech—which gives her access to every system—but she’s unique in having worked both the security and computer engineering sides of the company.”

“
If
she gets with the program.”

Mauchly’s cell phone went off, and he quickly raised it. “Mauchly.” A pause. “Yes, of course, sir. Right away.”

He replaced the cell phone. “That was Silver. He wants to see us, and right now.”

TWENTY-ONE

T
he day had grown dark and overcast, and the elevator doors opened onto a view far different than Lash had witnessed the day before. Only a handful of the cut-glass ceiling fixtures threw small pools of light across the vast room. Beyond the windows lay a gray stormscape of skyscrapers. The museum-like collection of thinking machines lay before them, hulking objects set against a lowering sky.

Richard Silver was standing by the bank of windows, hands clasped behind his back. At the elevator’s chime he turned.

“Christopher,” he said, shaking Lash’s hand. “Nice to see you again. Something to drink?”

“Coffee would be nice.”

“I’ll get it,” said Mauchly, moving toward a wet bar set into one of the bookcases.

Silver motioned Lash to the same table they’d sat at the day before. The magazines and newspapers were gone. Silver waited for Lash to sit, then took a chair across from him. He was wearing corduroys and a black cashmere sweater, sleeves pulled up his forearms.

“I’ve thought a lot about what you told me yesterday,” he said. “About these deaths not being suicide. I didn’t want to believe it. But I think you were right.”

“I don’t see any other possibility.”

“No, I didn’t mean that. I meant what you said about Eden being involved, either way.” Silver looked past Lash, his expression troubled. “I’ve been too wrapped up in my own projects, here in my ivory tower. I’ve always been more fascinated by pure science than applied science. Trying to build a machine that can think, learn,
solve
problems on its own: that’s where my heart’s always been. Exactly what problems interested me less than the
capability
of solving them. It wasn’t until the idea for Eden came along that I grew personally involved. Finally, a task to which Liza was worthy: human happiness. Even so, I’ve kept removed from the day-to-day process. And I see now this was a mistake.”

Silver stopped, his gaze focused again on Lash. “I’m not sure why I’m telling you this.”

“People tell me I’ve got a face that inspires confidences.”

Silver laughed quietly. “Anyway, I finally decided that, if I’ve been uninvolved in the past, there
was
something I could do. Now.”

“What’s that?”

Mauchly returned, coffee in hand, and Silver stood. “If you’ll come with me?”

He led the way to a far corner, where the glass windows that ran around three sides of the room met the bookcases of the fourth. Here, Silver’s collection of computing machines appeared to run to the musical: a Farfisa Combo; a Mellotron; and a modular Moog synthesizer, all patch cords and low-pass filters.

Silver turned to him. “You said the killer was most likely a rejected Eden candidate.”

“That’s what the profile suggests. Perhaps a schizoid personality that couldn’t accept rejection. There’s a smaller chance the killer dropped out of the program
after
acceptance. Or was one of those clients not matched within your five-cycle window.”

Silver nodded. “I instructed Liza to parse all accessible applicant data, looking for anomalies.”

“Anomalies?”

“It’s a little hard to explain. Imagine creating a virtual topology in three dimensions, then populating it with applicant data. Compress the data, compare it. It’s almost like the avatar matching Liza does every day, done in reverse. See, our applicants have
already
been psychologically vetted; they should all skew to tightly bounded norms. I was looking for applicants whose behavior, personality, lie
outside
those norms.”

“Deviants,” Lash said.

“Yes,” Silver looked pained. “Or people whose behavior patterns were out of sync with their evaluations.”

“How did you do this so quickly?”

“Actually, I didn’t. I instructed Liza on the nature of the problem, and she developed the methodology on her own.”

“Using the data from applicant testing?”

“Not only that. Liza also called on data trails left by rejected applicants and voluntary dropouts in the months or years since their original applications.”

Lash was shocked. “You mean, data gathered
after
they weren’t potential clients anymore? How is such a thing possible?”

“It’s called activity monitoring. It’s practiced by many large corporations. The government does it, too. We’re just a few years ahead of everybody else. Mauchly’s probably shown you some of its elementary uses already.” Silver smoothed the front of his sweater. “In any case, Liza flagged three names.”

“
Flagged?
As in, already?”

Silver nodded.

“But there must have been a tremendous amount of data—”

“Approximately half a million petabytes. It would have taken a Cray a year to parse. Liza completed it in hours.” And he gestured at something near the wall.

Lash stared with fresh amazement at something he’d assumed was another antique from Silver’s collection. A standard computer keyboard sat on a small table, before an old-fashioned monochrome VDT terminal. A printer stood to one side.

“This is it?” Lash said incredulously. “This is Liza?”

“What did you expect?”

“I didn’t expect this.”

“Liza herself, or her computational plant, occupies the floors directly below us. But why make an interface more complicated than it has to be? You’d be surprised how much I can accomplish with just this.”

Lash thought about the computing feat Liza had just completed. “No, I wouldn’t.”

Silver hesitated. “Christopher, you’d mentioned another possibility. That the killer was somebody on our own staff. So I also instructed Liza to search for anything unusual,
internally
.” His expression grew tight, as if in physical pain. “She flagged one name.”

Silver turned to the small table, picked up two sheets of folded paper, and pressed them into Lash’s hand.

“Good luck—if that is indeed the right word.”

Lash nodded, turned to go.

“Christopher? One other thing.”

Lash glanced back.

“I know you understand why I gave this Liza’s highest priority.”

“I do. And thanks.”

He let Mauchly lead the way to the elevator, considering Silver’s last words. The same thought had also been running through his own head. The Thorpe couple had died on a Friday, eleven days before. The Wilners had died the following Friday. Serial killers liked consistency and pattern.

They had three days.

TWENTY-TWO

F
our names,” Mauchly said.

He was staring at the table in Lash’s office. The two sheets of paper Silver provided lay on it, unfolded.

“Any idea why Liza flagged these four in particular?” Tara asked from across the table.